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Feb 11, 2016 OK Go By Christopher Roberts

OK Go are no strangers to crafting incredibly cool music videos, ones that often overshadow the band’s songs, but go viral. Well they may have topped themselves this time. Their new video for “Upside Down & Inside Out” was actually filmed in zero gravity aboard a Russian S7 Airlines plane. OK Go frontman Damian Kulash Jr. co-directed the video with his sister and frequent collaborator Trish Sie.

The band had long dreamed of making a truly weightless video and teamed up with S7 to make it happen. Kulash explained in a press release how the video came together: “It was nearly a decade ago that the world started buzzing about commercial space travel and exploration. When I heard about Virgin Galactic and Space X, it dawned on me that soon enough, people will be making art in space. So for years, we’ve been looking for the opportunity to make a weightless video. I mean, what could be more thrilling than astronaut training? I met with people from S7 at a media event at the Cannes Lions festival in France and that’s where the adventure began.”

They spent three weeks at Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center for ROSCOSMOS (aka the Russian version of NASA) rehearsing, testing, and filming. The video was filmed on a Il-76 MDK plane and features S7 air hostesses Tatyana Martynova and Anastasia Burdina, who are both trained aerialist acrobats. The plane can only grant 27 seconds of weightlessness at a time and then there’s a five-minute gap before weightlessness can be achieved again. “Because we wanted the video to be a single, uninterrupted routine, we shot continuously over the course of eight consecutive weightless periods, which took about 45 minutes, total,” explained Sie in the press release. “We paused the action, and the music, during the non-weightless periods, and then cut out these sections and smoothed over each transition with a morph.”

To know that they really shot this, without digital effects beyond the morphing between shots, even if it was just in 27-second blasts, is pretty thrilling. You can watch the video over at the band’s Facebook page or below. The song is taken from the band’s 2014 album, Hungry Ghosts, which is out now via Paracadute.